Drawing/Measuring training

Download

New excercises

The Speed chase exercise consists of then individual exercises/sheets. The purpose is to fill in the missing point as fast as you can. Score is given based on accuracy and time spend. This can give you an indication on how good your measurement intuition is.

The large canvas with a background picture exercise is very close to how it feels when you're actually drawing a portrait. You will se the entire picture in the box to the left. In the box to the right, you will only see an eye which you'll have to use as reference to add the missing points.

Background

These exercises are for those who like to draw. One of the problems in freehand drawing is to know where to draw what. You may have experienced that you have drawn an eye or a nose very well, but since you have drawn it in the wrong place, it destroys much of the drawing.

I came across some very interesting vidoes on Youtube of EclecticAsylumArt where he introduces a technique called triangulation. Using this technique, you will by two points be able to determine the position of a third unknown point. This is done by calculating the angle from the two known points.

What's so great about this technique is that it can be trained and become intuitive. After some training, you will be able to measure very accurately only using your eyes.

The video below shows you how EclecticAsylumArt uses this technique to "paint" the famous Mona Lisa in MS Paint.

The video below is from EclecticAsylumArt's "How to draw portraits" series in which he illustrates the triangulation technique.

Instructions

You will see some pre-defined points in the box to the left. Your goal is to copy them to the box to the right. To do this, click where you think that the point should be.

Training on paper

Practicing - drawing shapes

Basically, a drawing consists of a combination of shapes in different values. This exercise (shapes.pdf) will train you in drawing shapes and in
drawing them at the right place.

The good thing about this exercise is that it would give you some feedback on how successful( or unsuccessful :^) you were.
After you are finished drawing, cut the page in half, place them over each other and hold them up against a lamp.

Comments

Is there any way to download these exercises, so we could practice even if we are offline? The PDFs help but not all exercises are represented.

Wayne Collinsat 05:24PM, 2011/06/07.

Admin comment

Wayne,I have added a download link (See top of page).

DHTMLGoodiesat 12:58PM, 2011/06/08.

First, thanks for the download link.Second, after doing a lot of these exercises I find I have improved but I'm still off by a mm or so on a couple of points ( judged 100% by eye, no measuring ). Is this normal? In other words, how good does your eye and guestimation get?

Wayne Collinsat 03:47PM, 2012/03/21.

Admin comment

Wayne,Thank you for your post. I have created this script, but I'm not a drawing expert my self, so I'm not sure if my answer is of any value :)If you're off by as little as that, then you're very good!!What I found out when drawing is that it's good to have some reference points. Let's say you are about to draw a curve. That curve becomes much easier to draw once you have measured where it starts and where it ends.Personally, I also found it much easier to measure points that are almost vertical or almost horizontal. So I try to find points like that first. Another good drawing exercise is to try to draw as fast as you can. keep your pencil moving all the time and don't let your brain kick in and instruct you how you should draw:) The thinking, logical left side of our brain doesn't know anything about drawing(see http://drawright.com/theory.htm)---AlfDHTMLGoodies.com

DHTMLGoodiesat 08:22PM, 2012/03/21.

Is there anywhere to still get the M. Monroe worksheets?

philip napierat 10:28PM, 2012/04/09.

Hi There,I no longer see any dots on the triangulation exercises...this used to work fine. Any ideas>Thanks

richat 04:01AM, 2013/03/25.

Admin comment

rich wrote: #
Hi There,

I no longer see any dots on the triangulation exercises...this used to work fine. Any ideas>

Thanks

Rich,

Thanks for notifying me of this. There was a problem in some browsers with parts of the code. This has now been fixed.

Alf
DHTMLGoodies.com

DHTMLGoodiesat 03:51PM, 2013/03/25.

Hey thanks for this wonderful tool, it's really good. If you don't mind I have a couple of suggestions to improve it. First of all, I have a major in neuroscience, I know how the brain learns how to do things (in our case, how to measure angles and distances), and it's through a "feedback loop" 1)You do something, for example you guess the distance between 2 points) 2)You receive some kind of feedback on how you performed, 3)you give it another try making sure you use the feedback information you received, trying to correct the previous mistakes. The smaller this feedback loop, the better.Doing this over and over your brain improves in that particular task.You put a feedback loop at the end (where you show where the user was wrong), but it's too big of a loop: I know where I did wrong in all the dots, but I don't know what to do with this info, because there is too much feedback all at once, and I can't go back and correct my mistakes. So, in my opinion, after a dot is placed in the right canvas, you should insert some sort of instant feedback of where the correct dot is, and give the user the possibility to retry. more than once. For example, right after the user clicks the mouse to place the dot, the image of the correct dot should appear for a couple of seconds, maybe in red, so the user can look at it, try to memorize it and give it another go, maybe for 3 or 4 tries total. The second suggestion is, you should make this tool available as an app for the iPad or similar, so the user could use a stylus, and mimic the movements done with a pencil. Anyway, I hope you don't mind my suggestions, your tool is really great regardless!